Argos and WH Smith pile into the online entertainment punch-up

Two big high street names have piled into the lucrative online entertainment retail bun fight. Argos and WH Smith have today launched spin-offs from their main sites, and both are offering free delivery.

Argos claim they have savings of up to 80% off 125,000 DVD, Blu-ray and CD titles while WHS also have games, consoles, electronics and computing under their new ‘Entertainment’ umbrella. Smiths are not new to flogging this kind of stuff but this is the first time they’ve offered permanent free home delivery.

It’ll be a tall order for both companies to snaffle a significant portion of the online pie, with or without their free delivery boast. After all, play.com offer the same and Amazon’s delivery is free on all orders over £5 – which, let’s face it is most of them.

Upon first glance, prices on both sites don’t seem to be eye-scorchingly low, but you might find something in there that will tickle your fancy. First impression is that it could be too little too late for both companies when others have already worked hard to establish themselves over the years.

Would YOU switch over from Amazon, play.com or your other regular online entertainment retailer to these ageing Johnny-come-latelys or are you happy with the way things are? Maybe you don’t buy CDs or DVDs and just download them all illegally. Probably best if you keep it to yourself then if you do.

12 comments

Both of these websites are just rebrands of the hut and have nothing to do with Argos or WHSmith apart from the branding. Likewise with Zavvi, Currys, Dixons, Asda, Lovefilm, Dialaphone, Phones4U, Sendit, PCWorld and possibly more.

Re-brands of the Hut - very true, their modus operandi (at least used to be) that they offer the site to the retailer for free, and do a profit share on takings, so there's no real reason for the retailer to decline the offer on an entertainment site given all they need do is help to market it and reap any rewards that follow.
hopefully their delivery times these days are better than the last time i used them :-s

Exactly - this isn't the retailers launching their own sites and diving into the market - it's just a branding exercise from The Hut. They run FAR too many websites now, with usually pennies difference between them all.